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Spotify Rolls Out New ‘Wrapped’ Campaign To Help Users Remember Their Decade Of Music

Spotify debuted a new TV spot today to promote its Wrapped 2019 playlists.

YouTube: Spotify

People often say music is the soundtrack of life. We use it to navigate our day and to narrate it. We use it to heal and use it to grow. Sometimes we use it to try to understand what we’re feeling in the first place. But music doesn’t just color the present; it annotates the past. We hear a song, and we’re suddenly jolted back.

I remember when I discovered my favorite band of the decade. It was 2009, and a friend had given me a copy of Bon Iver’s first album, “For Emma, Forever Ago.” I didn’t have an iPhone or iPod yet, so I brought the CD with me to South Korea, where I played it on repeat on my Sony Walkman while quarantined on an island off the coast during the swine flu scare. I remember other memories from other bands, too, such as hearing the English indie duo The xx for the first time in 2010, days after moving to New York City. (A decade later, their songs still remind me of the bar in Brooklyn where I first heard them.) I remember driving north and south many weekends on Interstate 65 between Alabama and Tennessee while deciding whether I should move to Nashville in 2014, listening to bands from Birmingham like Fort Atlantic and Wilder Adkins or Nashville songwriters such as Molly Parden and Peter Bradley Adams.

This month, tens of millions of people have been going through their own digital archives of music and memories as part of Spotify’s annual Wrapped project, which gives each user a detailed report of their top songs from the last year featuring most played, favorite genres and other stats. To close out the decade, the Swedish music streaming service did a special version this year showcasing each person’s past decade of music—perhaps jogging memories in a role previously played by vinyl records or CDs in decades a little farther back.

The campaign has been a viral hit that’s turned millions of people into unpaid Spotify influencers by sharing their own favorites on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. In the first week after Spotify Wrapped 2019 went live earlier this month, Spotify told Forbes, more than 60 million users engaged with the in-app story experience that racked up nearly 3 billion streams from Wrapped playlists. It’s also been a massive hit on social media, which according to Twitter has been mentioned in at least 1.2 million posts during the same period of time. (It’s also made Apple Music listeners jealous that their musical history hasn’t been collected in the same way.)

“This also creates this FOMO effect that happens and that inherently entices new users to consider Spotify, so it’s a flywheel effect,” says June Sauvaget, Spotify’s global head of consumer and product marketing.

Today, as part of the next wave of the campaign, Spotify is debuting a new TV ad that aims to bring to life the diverse personal music tastes of its users. The spot, created by Spotify’s in-house creative team, features a young man walking through an unidentified city where he interacts with people while adding their favorite songs to his playlist. (Their words to him double as song titles.)

According to Alex Bodman, Spotify’s vice president and global executive creative director, the goal was to make the setting feel like it could be anywhere and relatable to everyone—regardless of their music tastes.

“Every year we have more stories than we can probably make and more ideas than we can probably make and as we craft the digital experience,” he says. “I think there is always a balance of the stories that we know people are going to want—the familiar that they are going to expect—and working in the stories they wouldn’t expect that make them think about listening in the different way.”

Outdoor advertising plays a key role again in this year’s Wrapped campaign. In fact, Spotify says it has 5,100 unique billboards and other out-of-home ad placements running globally. However, Bodman said much of online presence has been organic.

“For us, what we’ve found is it allows you to create cultural moments,” Bodman says. “And in a time when everyone has smartphones and people are sharing on social all the time, we actually think of out of home (ads) as potentially social media as well—only if you treat it as something that you’re not just trying to think of as an ad. You’re trying to entertain.”

A Spotify Wrapped ad inside of a train station in Brazil.

Spotify

The campaign also in some ways gives digital music fans a way to remember the albums and songs they don’t remember loving without having a physical CD or record to trigger it. Bodman said that wasn’t the intention, but it was maybe something that was in Spotify’s collective subconscious.

“I think instinctively, we end up leaning into that memorialization a little bit in the creative,” Bodman says. “This year we have a second section where you can see the top 10 songs of the year, but we created it kind of like you would a bunch of record covers all lined up. Almost like you are crate-digging.”

While Wrapped has become a global phenomenon every December, it’s evolved over the past few years. In 2015 when it first debuted, the project was simply a microsite showing top songs and top genres as a way to show how music fans engaged with the platform. A year later, it evolved to include personalized year-end playlists and was rebranded officially to “Wrapped” and rolled out with a full-funnel campaign. In 2017, Wrapped expanded from users to artists and advertisers to give them metrics on the past year. Last year, Wrapped debuted in 18 markets which then expanded to 21 markets this year along with it being built into the native app.

In order to have time to build out the mobile app version of Wrapped, Spotify began planning back in February. But because the data for the year wouldn’t be available until the fall, the company first started with identifying stories they wanted to tell about the music people listened to. That led to the inclusion of showing people stats like how many countries their favorite music came from and also how users listened to podcasts, which has been a growing part of the platform especially since Spotify acquired Gimlet Media and Anchor earlier this year. When data became available in mid-October, Spotify then began validating the stories they thought might be relevant with the data they actually had to make sure their hypotheses weren’t too far off.

As part of its Wrapped 2019 campaign, Spotify is highlighting how many podcasts users listened to as ... [+] the company leans more heavily into the medium.

Spotify

“One of the things we’re really proud of at Spotify is we are truly global and music does get consumed beyond borders,” Sauvaget says.

Spotify has also been testing some other emerging formats. For example, it’s been experimenting with TikTok by challenging people on the Chinese social media platform to create content based on their Wrapped playlists. It’s also running embedded video ads.

“What’s interesting for us specifically is it’s very endemic to music and the current behavior in music breaks on Tiktok, but then they go to Spotify to listen to the full song,” Sauvaget said.

The audio platform has also been experimenting with mixed and augmented reality. Last month, it released a version of the app on the Magic Leap headset that uses spatial computing to curate playlists in various rooms. (A separate version of the app for augmented-reality glasses created by North lets people control their music, too.)

Regardless of the medium, the billions of streams and memories have orchestrated a collective soundtrack for the first generation of streamers.

“It’s a unique lens,” Bodman says, “when a lot of us are looking back on a wild ten years and then taking it to a personal level.”

I'm editor of the Forbes CMO Network, leading coverage of marketing and advertising especially related to the ever-evolving role of chief marketing officers. I also

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I'm editor of the Forbes CMO Network, leading coverage of marketing and advertising especially related to the ever-evolving role of chief marketing officers. I also manage a number of Forbes lists including World's Most Valuable Brands, CMO Next, and 30 Under 30 (Marketing & Advertising). Previously, I was a tech reporter with Adweek and before that covered business and politics in Alabama for The Associated Press and The Birmingham News. Email me at mswant@forbes.com with news tips or other story ideas.